Hell Club FAQhttps://hell.club/faq
Questions and answers about Hell Club, Oh Hell, online gambling and card games.Fri, 19 Oct 2018 11:31:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5Why Burning Pot™ and not increased stake?https://hell.club/faq/why-burning-pot-and-not-increased-stake/
https://hell.club/faq/why-burning-pot-and-not-increased-stake/#respondWed, 19 Sep 2018 11:05:22 +0000https://hell.club/faq/?p=38Oh Hell Stackpot revolves around a table currency called Hellcoins. The nature of the game is that instead of having a dynamic table fee like blinds or ante that can decrease or increase, the game has a stake which declares the value of a Hellcoin. In tournaments, there is no stake. Instead, you pay an entry fee to receive a number of Hellcoins as your starting stack.

Considering the nature of the Hellcoin table currency concept, it would be very confusing to increase the number of Hellcoins spent in a hand for tournaments only. But the purpose of increasing blinds is to limit the amount of time that a tournament runs, and this can be achieved without raising the stake or blinds.

The Burning Pot concept instead reduces the number of Hellcoins in play every hand. Eventually, there won’t be enough Hellcoins left for everyone to be able to have a stack, and people will start to drop out. What’s even more exciting with the Burning Pot idea is that a number of coins will burn away for each table in play. So in the beginning of a multi-table tournament, many tables will burn away many coins. But for the intriguing final table, where people will have brought all their winnings, the burn will be single-table only, and the end game will excitingly be more drawn out.

]]>https://hell.club/faq/why-burning-pot-and-not-increased-stake/feed/0Why is the Stackpot™ concept a better scoring system?https://hell.club/faq/why-is-the-stackpot-concept-a-better-scoring-system/
https://hell.club/faq/why-is-the-stackpot-concept-a-better-scoring-system/#respondWed, 19 Sep 2018 09:30:40 +0000https://hell.club/faq/?p=36Certain games that you play in rounds have a zero-sum scoring system, ie a system where you can get negative points and positive points, and the sum of all points is always 0. An example of such a game is French Tarot. For these games, all you have to do to turn it into a betting game is to determine how much money a point is worth. The scoring system of classic Oh Hell is of a different nature; the scores just keep increasing.

The Stackpot design turns Oh Hell scoring into a zero-sum system, while also adding another score holder – the table pot. The pot adds an element of fun that makes the game more variable, and enables gigantic wins and more strategic thinking.

When looking at traditional Oh Hell, there are also a few issues with the standard scoring system. The system dictates that if you succeed to take the amount of tricks that you bid, you get a score of your bid plus 10. Bidding 0 and not taking any tricks is significantly much easier than bidding and taking multiple tricks, due to avoiding the risk of having to give away a trick after you took one. But the score you get is very similar (10), which makes it better to just bid 0 all the time.

There are multiple different scoring variants that try to tackle the zero-bidding (and other problems), for instance one where a successful zero-bid only gives 5 points instead of 10, another where you will always get a bonus of 5 points, regardless of your bid. While these rules definitely will reduce the value of zero-bidding, it doesn’t give an entirely fair balance of all the different bids.

Wikipedia lists 32 different scoring systems. This proves that it has been very difficult to find a fair and balanced standard scoring system for the game.

With the Stackpot system, if you bid 0, you will only win your ante back. It’s a solution for when you get a really bad hand, but you cannot abuse zero-bidding to gain scores (or win money). The Stackpot system encourages taking risks and bidding higher when the table pot is big, because the reward per trick increases if the table pot is big.

The classic scoring system also makes it very hard to come back from being behind. If you have busted 3 or 4 times more than your opponent after half the game, you basically already know you will lose. The Stackpot concept allows you to take a risk and get a high reward when the table pot is high, which can immediately put you in the lead.

Another big advantage is that it enables play without having to participate for 20+ rounds. Sometimes, you may only have time to play 5-10 rounds, and the Stackpot cash tables enables this play, and encourages you to play until next Pot Wipe.

This concludes some advantages with the monetary Stackpot system that not only enables gambling, but also makes the game more fun!

]]>https://hell.club/faq/why-is-the-stackpot-concept-a-better-scoring-system/feed/0What are the best card games for gambling?https://hell.club/faq/what-are-the-best-card-games-for-gambling/
https://hell.club/faq/what-are-the-best-card-games-for-gambling/#respondMon, 23 Apr 2018 12:18:41 +0000https://hell.club/faq/?p=25As a newly started business aiming to expand the online multiplayer gambling scene beyond Texas Hold’em, research indicated that card games require a certain nature to be prone to gambling. The three most important aspects (in my opinion) are:

There has to be an element of psychology in it, so that there is no “optimal gameplay” that can be recreated in bots.

The mix between skill and luck has to be perfectly calibrated, to the extent that you will feel “in control” when you play, but anyone can still win.

The game needs to have a gambling model.

Fortunately, the second point is true for most card games (except maybe the pure-luck ones). The first one however, is a bit more unusual. At first, I thought that to achieve an appropriate psychological element, the no limit bet/raise/call model was more or less required, but when I saw the success of Open Face Chinese Poker (more specifically Pineapple OFC), I realized that this model of betting isn’t a must.

With all my experience in the card game industry, the card games that have more aspects than just doing the best you can with your randomly dealt hand are very few, but they are also the ones played the longest.

I quickly fell into the trick-taking game group, where I considered Bridge, Whist, Hearts and of course Oh Hell, among other games. The nature of some of these games is that they are played 2 vs 2, and while this is an area I’d like to explore for online gambling in the future, it may not be the best game to start your site with.

Oh Hell – a trick taking game where you guess how many tricks you can take based on your hand and on your opponents’ guesses – turned out to be a pretty good fit for gambling. But it was missing a component: The gambling model. When creating the Stackpot model with this game in mind, I wanted to eliminate some of the downsides of the scoring system in Oh Hell (for instance, the zero-bidding being a lot safer and rewarding than bidding higher, and having to play 20+ rounds in a single game), while at the same time adding a betting element. The model turned out really well, and is now suitable for cash games, Sit & Go’s and tournaments (with the Burning Pot extension).

Other card games I have on my todo-list are Hearts, French Tarot, Liar’s Dice (although not a card game) among others.